Part 14: Turn 13: Bookkeeping and Logistics
Ha ha look two battles what could the other battle be I wonder what it could be yeah it's Fluffy Bunnies again.
The other battle is an independent province that manages to get in some good hits on my elephants before my elephants paste them. No, I'm not taking screenshots of either.
GLORY BE
I seem to recall that the supply points magic site bonuses are bugged, but thank Butterworth for some more gems finally. Maybe this will break my lucky streak.
Cursed units get vastly higher chances of being afflicted from battle damage. This is horrible if it hits your previously-supercombatant Pretender God. It's pretty much meaningless if it hits, say, a pair of Hypaspists.
(Future Me: As a purely hypothetical situation, of course.)
This would be more useful if my province defense wasn't 1 on all my conquered territories and if it hadn't hit a province with no strategic significance whatsoever. On the other hand, hey, free defense.
So here we are. I've run out of independent provinces to capture. I've got scouts everywhere and units everywhere. It's definitely time to go to war, and by now you should be able to guess who I'm planning to hit, but I'll give a bit of a more logical description.
(Future Me: I must say, I'm curious if other experienced players would have made the same choice as I did, and whether there's any details or subtleties that I was missing. Any commentary?)
First, look at the map. C'tis is out in the middle of the map, surrounded by everyone in a terrible defensive position - if I take his territory, I'll inherit his defensive position. Midgard has a relatively nice location, but in a nasty position for me to invade - I'd be funneling my entire army through a single province past C'tis. Agartha, on the other hand, is backed up in a corner, and if conquered won't increase my front line at all.
I'm #1 in provinces. C'tis is tied for #3, Midgard is tied for #5. Agartha is way the fuck down at #9 or so.
(Future Me: It's occured to me that I never list what colors we are. I'm the light blue line at the top. C'tis is the light green line. There's two dark red lines, Midgard and Bogarus. Midgard is the slightly brighter one. It generally isn't ambiguous which is which, they have pretty opposite strategies right now. Agartha is the black line, though in this picture I think it's mostly behind the saturated blue line (Atlantis).)
Out of the options, I'm the only one with a second fort. So that's a wash. (Abysia continues to exploit its ludicrous money income. Seriously, Abysia.)
(Future Me: No, you can't distinguish the lines. Just trust me.)
Midgard is tied with me in income, C'tis a bit lower. Agartha, again, is further down.
Midgard is barely beating Agartha in gems, and C'tis is in a three-way tie for 3rd. That's a bit of a wash too.
Agartha's third for research, well ahead of me, trailed by C'tis and Midgard. Agartha wins this battle, for once, though not very significantly against C'tis.
Agartha's: the only one of the three that's below me.
(Future Me: Not that dominion is all that important in war, most of the time.)
Remember, the absolute value is meaningless. Look at the curves: Agartha's lost two battles in a row lately. C'tis is climbing rapidly, and Midgard's also moving up steadily.
Summary: Agartha worries me the least and is in the tastiest position. We're goin' Agartha-hunting.
The battle plan is pretty simple. I've got a large number of forces coming up from my capital. Those will join the forces currently around Jome, as well as reinforcements that Jome will produce until that moment. Then we all go storming down to flatten Agartha. As much as I'd love for this to be a quick decisive headshot, it's probably not going to be - I plan to split into a reasonably large number of rampaging elephant groups to crush his province defense and steal his territory out from under him, then worry about his capital. I'll keep a constant stream of reinforcements coming from my forts if I possibly can. The fact is that I don't have the magical firepower available right now to take down his cave drakes - if he's fielding a lot of them, I might be in trouble. Luckily, cave drakes are money-intensive in much the same way that elephants are, and I've got a lot more money incoming than he does.
Since he only has one fort, he can only recruit significant forces at that one location. You can't recruit at a sieged fort, so if I can siege it, I can basically lock it - and him - down permanently. The only problem would be him breaking out of the fort successfully, so I plan to play some guerilla games to put my army in the least amount of risk possible while still preventing him from recruiting. We'll see how well that works - my swarms of scouts may come in very useful.
I skirt Agartha's capital for now. I really want to see inside it, but chances are good it's got a lot of province defence, and that can expose Scouts. If he's smart, he's also got any idle war commanders patrolling. I don't want to go near there, not because I value my scouts highly, but because I don't want to tip my hand.
I also move a trio of Sibyls towards the battlefield. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to use them for yet, but they've got half a dozen spells that are potentially useful, and some that could really piss Agartha off. For example, Curse. I'd move more, but they're going to be meeting a force of Mystics at Jome, plus the Sibyl I sent to build the lab and temple, and I can't really afford to sacrifice more research.
Speaking of which, I double-check to make sure that I'll have Alteration 3 before the battle starts. Then I triple-check it. If my math is off, I am screwed.
Finally, I give one of my Commanders my last Astral Pearl and send him down to rendezvous with Mrs. Butterworth. I'm feeling a bit paranoid about having her out there in the open and want to give her an escape route. (Future Me: I also completely screw it up because I need two Astral Pearls for the escape route I have planned. We'll, uh, we'll come back to this.)
A-Day in four turns.
Next: I talk about gems.